Sun$hine (Tahni Holt)

A cardboard world, shiny and sequined.

A towering wall of used cardboard boxes
stretches diagonally across the stage, clear packing tape glinting in
the light. Robert Tyree enters, tall and long-limbed and dressed head to
toe in sequins, a black sequined hoodie and pants, gold-and-pink
sequined sneakers. He begins to deconstruct pieces of the cardboard
wall, organizing the boxes in rows of unequal length across the floor.
At one point, he sets down a box and then forcefully slides it to a new
position. It’s unclear if Tyree has a pattern or plan—and that’s just
how choreographer Tahni Holt likes it.

Holt,
a 37-year-old choreographer and performer who’s worked in Portland for
15 years, aims to create dance that allows audience members to form
their own narrative or meaning. She’s interested in how viewers
prioritize and order information, which she explains is a driving force
behind Sun$hine, a new evening-length work premiering Friday,
Nov. 9, at BodyVox. “Lots of dance works propose a single dominant
idea,” she says. “They tell you how to prioritize information. In this
piece, we’re leaving it up to you.”

In
spurning dogmatic intent, Holt’s approach is both generous and
challenging—it leaves room for various interpretations but also requires
focus and engagement from the audience. Sun$hine, a duet between
Tyree and Lucy Yim that’s two years in the making, varies greatly in
tone, tempo and movement style. At the beginning, Yim moves with
contained vitality. She precisely taps her foot in a semicircle,
carefully tucks her knees as she jumps and sinuously stretches her body
long against the floor. Later in the piece, she and Tyree spin like
dervishes, arms slicing through the air. A third performer, Suzanne Chi,
appears at one point in wings made of cardboard and pink duct tape,
alternately thrashing aggressively and collapsing in on herself. The
performers dance to poignant violin (played live by Kyleen King),
reverent choral music and a computer-generated, reverb-heavy
composition.

But
it’s no haphazard muddle. Holt notes the countless decisions made while
developing the work—the contrast between the drab cardboard and the
bling of the sequins, for example, or the moments when the performers
dance to silence. “We want to have grounding parts so people aren’t just
in esoteric land,” Holt says. “It’s not just ‘Go play with a bunch of
fucking boxes and have psychological or abstract experiences.’ There’s a
specificity there.”